On the second anniversary of Hamas’s brazen, murderous October 7 terror attack on Israel, and Israel’s subsequent two years of brutal war on Gaza, Donald Trump – like millions of other people worldwide – is desperate to see the conflict resolved.
Whether the US President has the patience to tolerate weeks or even months of diplomatic negotiations between the warring parties may be the biggest question hanging over Gaza’s future.
Trump, as ever, wants to move rapidly. The man who promised to resolve both the crisis in Gaza and the war in Ukraine on the first day of his presidency now describes those 2024 election campaign pledges as “sarcasm”. But with this year’s Nobel Peace Prize recipient due to be unveiled on Friday, there remains no international honour that the US leader craves more.
In his most recent telling of his foreign policy record, Trump claimed to have solved eight separate wars since his return to office in January. Previously, he has spoken of bringing peace to seven warzones – also a debatable assertion given that some of the conflicts where he helped to secure ceasefires were not, in fact, full-blown wars.
It is also jarring to note that as he trumpets an “unprecedented” record as a peacemaker, he is simultaneously threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act at home in order to flood troops onto the streets of more American cities.
To give Trump his due, the 20-point peace plan for Gaza that he unveiled last month, and supercharged by forcing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to endorse, is the most serious proposal for the territory that has yet surfaced.
It would see Hamas return all Israeli hostages – living and dead – within a 72-hour period (it remains unclear when that clock would start ticking). Hamas fighters in Gaza would be granted safe passage to travel to an as-yet unidentified third country. Hamas would agree to surrender its weapons and swear off any future involvement in Palestinian governing arrangements. Israel would engage in a full-scale military withdrawal from Gaza and allow vast and urgently needed quantities of humanitarian assistance into the territory. A “Board of Peace” headed by Trump, but possibly administered by Tony Blair, would then govern Gaza on a transitional (again, undefined) basis.
So the nitty-gritty of the negotiating process, which still involves only indirect talks between Israel and Hamas in the Egyptian port city of Sharm el-Sheikh, is deeply complex. Trump on Monday said “we have a really good chance of making a deal, and it’ll be a lasting deal”.
“Hamas has been agreeing to things that are very important,” he insisted.
Just 24 hours before the latest round of talks began, he urged the Israelis and Hamas to “move FAST”. On his social media account, in block capitals, he insisted that “TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE OR MASSIVE BLOODSHED WILL FOLLOW”, further underscoring the President’s impatience to get the agreement signed.
Trump appears to view the situation as entirely binary. “It’s a great deal for Israel, it’s a great deal for the entire Arab world, Muslim world and world, so we’re very happy about it,” he said on Monday. He portrays himself not so much as a peacemaker, but a dealmaker.
“I make deals. That’s what I do,” the career real estate magnate has said repeatedly since returning to office, and he genuinely appears to view statecraft as no more challenging than signing an agreement to build a skyscraper. Yet he is unable to explain exactly how his “Board of Peace” will function in Gaza, nor what personal role he will play except as its titular chieftain.
Many observers believe his impatience to secure peace in Gaza is laudable, and – as White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt often describes it – his “out-of-the-box thinking” has already taken the conversation between Israel and Hamas further than former president Joe Biden ever did.
Trump reportedly blew up at Netanyahu during a phone conversation last Friday in which the Israeli prime minister was expressing limited confidence in an early Hamas message that appeared to accept some elements of the 20-point plan. “I don’t know why you’re always so f**king negative,” Trump reportedly exploded. “This is a win. Take it,” he urged Netanyahu, according to reporting by the website Axios.
There is no doubt that Trump’s energy is driven by his quest for the Nobel, as he directly revealed during his 30 September speech to the United Nations General Assembly.
Pondering aloud whether he might secure the award, he answered his own question: “Absolutely not. They’ll give it to some guy that didn’t do a damn thing,” Trump said, in an oblique reference to former president Barack Obama, who won the Nobel Peace Prize at the beginning of his presidency in 2009, mostly because the Norwegian Nobel Committee viewed his election as a relief following George W Bush’s administration.
Trump groused that if he doesn’t win the prize on Friday, “it would be a big insult to our country … I don’t want it, I want the country to get it”, he insisted, in one of the biggest falsehoods he has ever articulated.
